David Frith was baptised at St James', Great Grimsby, on the 28th of February 1809, the youngest of the five children of William Frith and his wife Mary — Mary Dobbs, by the family record. The Friths were not old Grimsby people: his eldest brother Francis had been baptised in 1797 at Brocklesby, the estate village inland, and the family came into the port in the years it was rebuilding itself around its new dock. David took up stone, as his father worked before him.
In July 1826 the St James' register carries entry No. 1625, in the curate's plain hand: "Elizabeth Frith, bastard daughter of David & Jane" — the father's surname over the mother's, Frith over Swaine. What follows tells the rest: the next March, across the Humber at Sculcoates church in Hull, "David Frith, mason and a bachelor" married "Jane Swine, spinster" — he signed, she made her mark — and the couple raised Elizabeth and seven more children at Grimsby. Why they married across the water, both entered as "of this parish", the record does not say.
He did well enough in his trade. On the 2nd of March 1830 he was enrolled a Freeman of Grimsby — admission to the old borough's roll of privileged townsmen — and the 1841 census has the household in Silver Street, David a stone mason, eight children at home. Then, on the 20th of April 1847, he died, thirty-eight years old; the Hull Packet across the water gave him a line — "Mr. David Frith, stonemason" — and he was buried at St James' on the last day of the month. No cause is recorded in the family's papers.
What his widow did next is set out on this page as Janet arranged it, and it is its own kind of record. Jane took the eight children — the eldest twenty, the youngest seven — across the Humber to Hull, and by 1851 was keeping an inn at 21 Salthouse Lane, a servant in the house and lodgers at her table, her son John Henry already out working as a bricklayer. In 1860, a widow of High Street, she married William Jenkins, a Brixham fisherman — one of the Devon men whose smacks were then making Hull a fishing port — and she died in Hull in 1871, aged sixty-five. Every Frith on these pages descends from her crossing.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-03